So I was pondering this question regarding flour the other day: If my unbleached flour is white, why would I need to buy bleached flour? What is the difference?
So I googled it.
It turns out that when flour is done milling it is a yellowish color. It has to sit for a while to naturally turn white and become better for use. Some companies don’t want their flour sitting on their shelves when it could be turning them a profit so they bleach it using chemicals.
I read that, “Bleaching the flour accelerates the natural aging of the flour. Flour needs age to soften it so it can be used for baking, etc. Unbleached flour will age naturally in, say, 6 months. Bleaching the flour make it ready in weeks. Time is money, and it is cost effective for a big company to keep product moving (rather than tying up warehouse space, being vulnerable to critters and bugs over months rather than weeks, etc).”
Also, bleached flour has less protein than unbleached.
I also found some pretty alarming stuff on this site:
http://www.healthiertalk.com/little-known-secrets-about-bleached-flour-0499
Why Bleaching Makes White Flour Even Worse
It has been shown that alloxan is a byproduct of the flour bleachingprocess, the process they use to make flour look so “clean” and — well, white. No, they are technically not adding alloxan to the flour — although you will read this bit of misinformation on the Internet. But, they are doing chemical treatments to the grain that result in the formation of alloxan in the flour.
With so little food value already in a piece of white bread, now there is potentially a chemical poison lurking in there as well.
So what is so bad about alloxan?
Alloxan, or C4 H2O4N2, is a product of the decomposition of uric acid. It is a poison that is used to produce diabetes in healthy experimental animals (primarily rats and mice), so that researchers can then study diabetes “treatments” in the lab. Alloxan causes diabetes because it spins up enormous amounts of free radicals in pancreatic beta cells, thus destroying them.
Beta cells are the primary cell type in areas of your pancreas called islets of Langerhans, and they produce insulin; so if those are destroyed, you get diabetes.
There is no other commercial application for alloxan — it is used exclusively in the medical research industry because it is so highly toxic. Given the raging epidemic of diabetes and other chronic diseases in this country, can you afford to be complacent about a toxin such as this in your bread, even if it is present in small amounts?
Needless to say, I’m going to continue to use unbleached flour. Yeesh!
muffintopsbaking 